This qualitative case study explored how four high school English Language Arts teachers engaged with a Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) pedagogical framework originally developed for mathematics instruction. Teachers participated in a workshop series that introduced them to an empirically-derived CCW pedagogical framework and explored its application to ELA contexts. Through semi-structured interviews, we analyzed teachers' descriptions of their implementation of specific CCW practices and shifts in their reported pedagogical beliefs. Teachers reported leveraging multiple forms of capital, particularly social, linguistic, familial, and navigational, through practices like peer collaboration, heritage projects, and student-generated learning tools. Teachers also reported shifts from deficit-oriented, teacher-centered instruction toward asset-based, student-led pedagogy. Teachers valued the CCW framework for providing concrete practices that legitimized asset-based approaches. These findings suggest that the CCW pedagogical framework may serve as a practical guide for bridging theory to practice in assets-based pedagogy across disciplines.
This discussion piece explores how K-12 teachers enrolled in a graduate-level literacy engagement course engaged in a culture of reading. Through assignments like a literacy autobiography and a "book stack" project with discussion groups, teachers were encouraged to examine their literate identities, read for pleasure, and develop daily reading habits. The teachers' increased reading habits and informal conversations about books fostered a community of readers and inspired teachers to make changes to their teaching of reading. We explain that when teachers experience their own literate development, they become more authentic models for their students and prioritize choice and enjoyment in reading.
In this article, we discuss the seductive detail effect and its potentially harmful presence in learning materials like college textbooks. Our goal is to consider how seductive details can be detrimental to learning from text, particularly for those readers who struggle the most with college-level texts, and how to mitigate those negative effects. Seductive details are interesting, but irrelevant, portions of text that are only tangentially related to the topic of the text and are often of a controversial or sensational nature. When found in learning materials like textbooks, seductive details can have a negative impact on readers' ability to learn from that text. We discuss the seductive detail effect, how it can impact reading and learning from textbooks, and provide suggestions for how college reading instructors can help students mitigate adverse effects of seductive details while supporting their students' ability to independently learn from text.
Despite calls for writing reform over the past two decades, few of the recommendations from this work have made their way into high school classrooms in the United States where concerns about the paucity and quality of writing instruction remain. To gain deeper insights into the reasons for this phenomenon, this study examined a dialogic and iterative approach to embedded professional development focused on writing instruction that included a university partnership. Using the methodology of portraiture to explore empirical data, the study examined the process of revamping writing instruction in ninth and tenth grade English and how teachers with varying backgrounds of knowledge and experience teaching writing navigated writing instruction in a context of changing demands. The findings highlight the daily challenges of implementing writing reform, emphasize the importance of structural stability to sustain such reform, and illustrate the need for co-constructed dialogic learning with teachers and leadership striving to improve writing instruction. Two narrative portraits, assembled as a montage exemplifying persistent issues of contending with teacher turnover and changes in state mandatory testing, capture the struggle and potential of dialogic professional development to reform instructional practices. This study also queries the potential role of university researchers as engaged partners committed to long-term inquiry in support of educational reform.
This article discusses the benefits of adopting disciplinary literacy approaches in Mathematics. We propose disciplinary literacy practices foreground mathematical teachers' expertise and knowledge thereby enabling them to adapt generic literacy approaches to better address the specific literacy demands of the discipline. Specifically, we discuss how students' ability to write explanatory paragraphs (a component of a mathematical report) can be facilitated by the joint construction of writing and the provision of specific feedback on students' writing. Such an approach supports students' undersatnding of both mathematical concepts and the literacy demands of mathematical explanations. We draw on examples from a Year 7 Mathematics classroom teacher in regional South Australia, who participated in a disciplinary literacy 7-9 professional learning program. Analysis of teacher reflections and student work samples revealed improvements in students' writing of mathematical explanations, including increased use of discipline-specific vocabulary and sequencing connectives, emergent use of passive voice and expanded noun groups, and shifts from reflective recount to explanatory writing. We argue that integrating disciplinary literacy approaches into Mathematics instruction, which can include genre-aware modeling and targeted formative feedback on writing, offers a coherent framework to apprentice students into disciplinary ways of knowing and thinking.
This case study examines how digital storytelling (DST) serves as a tool for language and literacy learning, personal expression, and empowerment among Afghan refugee women. The researchers explore the experiences of five Afghan refugee women participating in a 3-month DST project. The participants engaged in iterative literacy practices, creating digital stories that integrated oral, written, aural, and visual elements. The analysis of participant-created artifacts and digital stories, interview transcripts, and observation notes identified three key themes: literacy learning through multimodal engagement, identity expression, and agency enactment. Findings suggest DST addresses linguistic and cultural barriers, fosters emotional well-being, and empowers the participants to reclaim their voices in addition to supporting their literacy learning.
This study explores critical literacy practice as a response to book ban in Indonesia, a nation shaped by colonial and authoritarian legacies of censorship. Through qualitative Classroom Action Research within a university-level Critical Reading course, it examines how students engage with historically contested novels, namely Bumi Manusia and Laut Bercerita, to confront state-controlled narratives. The findings reveal that critical literacy, when grounded in local histories of censorship, enables students to move from passive acceptance to active interrogation of state power. Through engagement with banned novels, students developed three interconnected capacities: recognizing censorship as a spectrum of political control rather than neutral administration; identifying dominant and alternative ideologies; and reclaiming interpretive agency by connecting silenced histories to contemporary politics. This development did not happen automatically; rather, it emerged through classroom discussion and guided research that pushed students to ask questions regarding book banning. The study highlights that critical literacy is not a universal toolkit but a situated praxis that, when calibrated to specific contexts of suppression, equips learners to decode state narratives, interrogate textual control, and confront repression over the narrative of what to read and not to read.
This paper examines the literacies of Lane (pseudonym), a 12-year-old Latino youth, within a semester-long community literacy partnership held while mothers attended GED classes. Lane's multimodal inquiry into graffiti unfolded through a curated text set in an inquiry-based researcher workshop model. His case illuminates how out-of-school partnerships can nurture youth identity and literacy engagement. Three key themes emerge: (1) Lane's increasing ownership of his researcher process, (2) the restorying of his literate identity from reluctant observer to artist and researcher, and (3) the agentive affordances of multimodality in building and sharing knowledge. Findings highlight the instrumental potential of community literacy spaces to disrupt deficit perspectives, affirm culturally and linguistically diverse youth literacies, and foster confidence and joy in literacy learning. This study underscores the value of designing inquiry-based, multimodal spaces that center youth interests and identities in literacy education.
Solving mathematics word problems is a complex task, particularly for emergent bilingual students, who must navigate both mathematical reasoning and substantial linguistic complexity. In this study, we developed a codebook to analyze the linguistic features of 40 math word problems from a 9th-grade Algebra textbook and identified the frequent occurrences of the linguistic components at both the lexical and syntactic levels. The analysis revealed frequent occurrences of dense noun phrases, technical terminology, polysemous words, and embedded clause structures-features that require considerable linguistic processing before students can access the underlying mathematical ideas. Such demands are especially consequential for emergent bilingual learners, whose mathematical competence may be obscured by the complexity of the language rather than the mathematics itself. The codebook developed in this study also offers math and ELA/ESOL teachers a practical tool for identifying and anticipating these comprehension challenges, enabling them to design instruction and scaffolds that support students in unpacking the language demand of math word problems. This study concludes with a discussion of pedagogical and research implications for educators who share the responsibility of supporting students, especially emergent bilingual students, in developing content-area literacy skills essential for success in solving math problems.
This study explored how an Afrocentric literacy workshop can reimagine inclusivity in literacy education for African immigrant adolescents. Drawing on Afrocentricity and Transnational Identity Theory, I facilitated a 10-week virtual literacy workshop with six African immigrant high school students from Nigeria. The study examined the affordances and challenges of implementing an inclusive, Afrocentric approach to literacy and the literacy practices enacted within this collaborative space. Data from recorded sessions, interviews, and student artifacts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings revealed that Afrocentric facilitation fostered cultural affirmation, multimodal expression, and critical dialogue, while also highlighting tensions such as internalized colonial ideologies and technological fatigue. The study offers implications for educators and researchers seeking to decolonize literacy education and center non-Western perspectives in inclusive pedagogies.
This study explores how critical literacy in a 9th-grade high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom supported youth in challenging justice issues they identified in their local communities. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework informed by literacy as a social practice, critical literacy, and power was used to interpret the data, including student-created infographics and written reflections over 4 years. Findings indicate that integrating critical literacy with a liberatory lens into the school curriculum helped students develop their understanding of justice in ways that supported them in taking action. We recommend that integrating critical literacy into ELA curricula can better support learners to lead, reflect, and advocate for justice within and beyond the classroom.
Contemporary YAL offers diverse perspectives often absent from the traditional literary canon, making it a vital resource for fostering student engagement, representation, and critical thinking. However, not all YAL texts offer authentic portrayals; some reinforce harmful stereotypes or present incomplete narratives. This article explores the value of using equity-oriented text sets to counter problematic representations and promote critical literacy. Drawing on Botelho and Rudman's Critical Multicultural Analysis (CMA) framework, I introduce a heuristic designed to help educators evaluate texts and curate meaningful, inclusive classroom collections. The article models the use of this heuristic through an analysis of Kwame Alexander's The Crossover (2014) and outlines strategies for guiding students in critically engaging with literature.
This piece presents a high schooler's first-person accounts of using generative AI tools across diverse literacy activities in and outside school. Through her own words, she describes her first encounter with ChatGPT in 8th grade, a US history project that required AI feedback mandated by the school, and informal uses such as adapting a cookie recipe and crafting social media posts. These narratives trace her growing understanding of GenAI, improvements in prompting skills, and heightened ethical awareness, while revealing the tensions between agency and dependence, and assistance and authorship that shape her stance as a writer. Together, these moments illustrate how GenAI is becoming embedded in her daily literacies. This case invites educators and literacy practitioners to recognize and build on students' authentic, self-directed AI practices, fostering critical, responsible, and ethical engagement with GenAI in their literacy development.
From a desire to create an "unruly edge" that values student voice in a holistically more authentic and creative learning environment, this qualitative action research study seeks to determine how reconfiguring the learning environment (holding ELA classes outside) contributes to literacy learning for students tracked into classes that foreground required writing processes. The discussion that follows addresses this research question (RQ): how might outdoor literacy events within a required ELA course encourage and expand writing practices of students tracked into standardized classes that emphasize basic skills acquisition? I wanted to know how offering self-expressive writing opportunities outside, accompanied by active environmental engagement, might inspire students who had not written much in ELA class to create something original and thereby better inform their teachers of their literacy skills.
This article examines teens' recreational reading activities as they move between books and digital media. It uses the model of connected reading to understand connections between teen reading practices and digital pastimes. Using focus group data, we draw on participants' experiences with books, fan texts, video games, and social media and video content to explore recreational reading alongside engagement with digital media. The article suggests that rather than digital practices being in opposition to reading, they are integral and enhance reading for pleasure.
Disciplinary literacies have offered portraits of both professors' and youths' rich experiences with academic disciplines but have yet to center descriptions of how knowledge-constructing communities might sustain play, joy, and humor. This study traces humorous discourse in an online literary community doing literary analysis and producing interpretive knowledge of the novel Dracula. Drawing on theories of the aesthetics of humor in social life, researchers qualitatively analyzed social media posts, likes, reblogs, and replies. Findings describe how this literary community employed playful disciplinary practices through verisimilitude shenanigans, literary form shenanigans, and recontextualization shenanigans to create humor and joy. This study expands understandings of disciplinary literacies in English language arts by seeing online literary spaces as knowledge-creating communities and showing how these spaces can center play and joy.
New literacies are not defined by their medium, but by broader shifts in how literacy is practiced. Offline, role-playing games, tabletop games, and interactive narratives are becoming more and more popular, affording students the ability to engage with and change storylines. Online, readers today are able to pick and choose what kinds of texts they encounter online, and texts themselves are now more interactive, shifting based on available information about readers' web histories. To read critically today, readers need to understand the degree to which meaning in all texts is not fixed, but subjectively constructed by socially-situated individuals as they read. Supporting students in developing nuanced understandings of how meaning arises through reading remains a challenge, however, particularly given the number of overlapping concerns literacy educators face. Responding to the need to explore how readers construct meaning interactively and multimodally while still incorporating literary texts, this study examines the ways in which undergraduate students collaboratively read a multimodal, interactive, graphic novel. The study focuses on how partcipants' reading experience helped them shift their paradigms regarding reading, understand their own subjective positionality as readers, and develop new theoretical and pedagogical understandings regarding critical meaning-making.
In this manuscript, the authors contend that today's concerns about declining college reading skills reveal a longstanding need to reframe and valorize the “productive struggle” inherent in postsecondary academic reading development. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence—including the persistent need of college‐level reading supports and the impacts of recent policy shifts and AI anxieties—the authors problematize deficit‐based narratives in media and policy. By unpacking “productive struggle” within a theory‐driven framework and offering practical recommendations, the manuscript invites educators to meet students with purposeful challenge and support.
